Name: Annabella Pitkin
Title: Writing as a Contemplative Tool for Humanistic Learning
College/Department: College of Arts and Sciences/Religion, Culture, and Society
Student Enrollment: 20
Course: REL / ASIA 169 - Enlightening Lives: Buddhist Auto/Biography in Asia and the US
Proposal: I will fully reimagine writing in this course and restructure my writing assignments around a writing and reading-focused process pedagogy. My goal is to cultivate student habits of deep reading and daily writing through daily journaling, creative reading-process assignments, metacognitive writing-reflection exercises, an inquiry based scaffolded writing assignment, and a series of experiential learning/reflection activities in collaboration with the CITL, LUAG, the Humanities Center and other campus and community partners.
I want to make this change both as a way to help students develop deeper analytic and conceptual engagement with course material and themes, and as a way to create more space for student creativity, exploration, and discovery. I also hope that reimagining the course's approach to writing will help me continue to build what I'm calling an "experiential classroom." I see this as a classroom where students develop a strong, mutually supportive, practice-based learning community, where students can engage in peer-to-peer as well as faculty-student learning. I hope this will help them take risks, tackle learning challenges together, and develop new habits of lifelong learning.
Collaborators: Justin Greenlee, Holly Zakos